Baby Sensory Play: Raspberry Spaghetti

Make a fun, creative and stimulating sensory play experience for baby using spaghetti flavoured naturally with fresh raspberries! Fantastic for promoting curiosity, investigation and exploration for babies and toddlers.

As usually happens in this house, I cooked a little too much spaghetti the other night. So instead of throwing it away, we turned it into a wonderfully tactile, sensory play invitation for baby Bean, inviting a full hands-up-to-elbows investigation (the absolute best kind of sensory play if you ask me!)

To increase the sensory element of the play I added a few drops of vegetable oil to make the spaghetti slippery and prevent it sticking together. We also squeezed the juice and pulp from a few fresh raspberries into the pasta to give it a hint of colour, smell and taste!

Bean thought her ship had come home when she first plunged her chubby wrists into the cool, slimy mix. She pulled it apart, examined it, dropped it, flung it, broke pieces off, squished it into her face, licked it and tasted it. The look of concentration and curiosity on her face really showed how much thinking and wondering was going on as she played and explored this new substance. She enjoyed her new “toy” and stayed absorbed in the experience for an extended period of time, crawling away and then back again to explore some more, repeatedly.

It also made for a tasty afternoon snack! Now that’s what I call a full on, multi-sensory play experience! Yum!

Learning Links:

[sensory play and exploration, by exploring textures, temperatures and tastes using all of the senses]